Here’s what I doubt you understand, Mr. Evers. I doubt you understand
how preordained your death seems to us now in the 21st century. We view
your murder through a mist of hindsight, and hindsight can obscure the
truth as well as reveal it. Fifty years later, we see your time -- that
whole decade, in fact -- as a hopeless epidemic of gun violence, a
little like Dodge City in the Wild West.

It was as if Americans
had lost the power of speech in the 1960s. In its place, they had
substituted a vocabulary of bullets. They had adopted a whole new syntax
of rifles and assassinations, and were using it to conduct a bloody
dialogue about human relations, war and race.

So who could possibly be surprised?

Certainly,
you had nothing to prove. You were more than a native Mississippian.
You were an outspoken black native Mississippian. And if that didn’t say
enough about your courage, you did a stint in the U.S. Army, serving
during World War II at Normandy.

But you also were a black man
foolhardy enough to accept an assignment as the first NAACP field
secretary in a terror-happy state. You dared to investigate the
terrorist murder of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till. You dared to organize
boycotts against filling stations that refused their restrooms to black
people. You dared to encourage African-Americans to register to vote.
Did the threats and attempts on your life really come as a surprise to
you at all?

Clayton,
This is a really poignant article that sharply articulates the problem
of communicating the true costs of the liberties we now enjoy. That
dialogue between the generations who lived the struggle and those who
benefitted from the struggle has truly broken down and is dire need of
repair. Your article can be one of the catalysts needed to jumpstart
that discourse.

In
1963, the year Medgar Evers was killed, more than 93 percent of births
occurred to married couples. Did he dream that in 2013 nearly 75
percent of African-American children would be born to single mothers?
Did he dream that more than half the nation's homicide victims would
African-American, though they make up only 13% of the population. Could
he imagine that 40 percent of African-American students don’t graduate
from high school? Is this the legacy of the Medgar Evers, and Martin
Luther King? Nearly every one of the negative measurements can be
reversed by creating and maintaining a two parent family.